Vurt 3 - Automated Alice (5 page)

“I most certainly have not!” cried Alice in exasperation, and then (after a second's further pondering) she added, “But I've got something even betterer, even sharperer!” (In her excitement Alice had forgotten all about her grammar.)

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A longer than long time later (because the branches were very thick and the hacksaw was more blunt than sharp) Alice finally managed to cut her way through the hedgerow. It was almost daylight by the time that she had pushed aside the final branches: and there she found herself at last, in the very centre of the maze. The statue of a young girl was standing upon a podium inside a circle of trees and shadows. She looked a lot like Alice, that statue, especially with the early morning's sunlight sheening her face; the statue even wore a (rather stiff-looking, granted) replica of Alice's red pinafore. Alice was quite taken aback by the resemblance. Why, for a whole second, Alice didn't know which girl she truly was! But on the statue's left shoulder Whippoorwill the parrot was perched. And stretched between the statue's outstretched hands was a long and writhing and very angry-looking, purple-and-turquoise-banded snake!

“Oh dear,” cried Alice (in a whisper), “I do hope that snake isn't poisonous!”

“Not only is this snake poisonous,” replied the statue in the croaky voice that Alice had heard previously, “it is also extremely venomous.”

“Is there a difference,” Alice asked (not even pausing to think about how a statue could speak), “between poisonous and venomous?”

“Most certainly there is: anything can be poisonous but only a snake can be venomous. Venom is the name of the poisonous fluid secreted from a snake's glands. The origins of the word can be traced back to the goddess Venus, thereby implying that snake venom can be used as a love potion. Perhaps it was this usage that directed Queen Cleopatra of Egypt to use this particular snake as her instrument of suicide. After all, this is an asp that I hold in my hands, also known as the Egyptian cobra.”

“Why ever don't you throw the snake away?” asked Alice of the statue.

“How can I?” the statue replied. “I can't even move. After all, I am a statue.”

“But you can talk, so you must be a very special statue,” said Alice.

“I am a very special statue. My name is Celia.”

“But that's my doll's name!” Alice cried (having quite forgotten, once again, until that very moment, that her doll was still missing).

“Yes, that's me,” the statue croaked to Alice, “I'm your doll.”

“You're Celia?”

“Yes, that's my name.”

“But you're much too large to be my doll,” exclaimed Alice. Indeed, the statue was exactly the same size as Alice.

“I'm your twin twister,” the statue said.

“But I haven't got a twin sister,” replied Alice, quite mishearing.

“I didn't say twin sister, I said twin twister. You see, Alice, when you named me Celia, all you did was twist the letters of your own name around into a new spelling. I'm your anagrammed sister.”

“Oh goodness!” said Alice, “I didn't realize I'd done that. How clever of me.” And then Alice finally worked out Whippoorwill's last riddle; she realized that the statue-doll sounded just like her in the way she spoke, and their names were the same, only misspelt: Celia and Alice.

“The trouble with you, Alice,” croaked Celia, “is that you don't realize you've done anything, until it's much, much too late. Whereas I your twin twister, I know exactly what I've done, even before I've done it.”

“Who turned you into this garden statue, Celia?”

“Pablo the sculptor.”

“And who is this Pablo?”

“Presently I shall tell you. For the moment, however, I'm quite helpless unless you remove this snake from my fingers.”

“Who put the snake in your fingers?” asked Alice.

“The Civil Serpents of course. Who else? They don't want us statues moving around freely, that would break all the rules of reality.”

“But --”

“Alice, there's no time for further questions. Kindly remove this asp from my grasp.”

“However shall I remove that snake,” Alice asked herself, “without getting myself poisoned? Or, indeed, venomed? Oh well, I suppose I can only try my very best if I'm ever going to get us all back home in time for my writing lesson. Now, what was it that Great Uncle Mortimer had said about dealing with dangerous creatures? Look them in the eye, that was it: look them in the eye and recite the Lord's Prayer.”

So Alice did look the snake in the eye; only, just as she was about to start her rendition of the Lord's Prayer the snake hissed! at her. Alice was sure she could hear certain words in between each hiss. They sounded something like this: “Do you mind, young lady? I'm an Under Assistant of the Civil Serpents!” And so very fearful a noise the snake made that Alice cleanly forgot every single word of the Lord's Prayer.

“Now look here, Mister Snake,” she cried (having decided that the snake was male for some reason), “I do believe that you're not very civil at all, keeping my doll under lock and fang.” But the snake just carried on hissing and wriggling and writhing and slithering and flickering out his forking tongue and showing off his fine set of fangs. It was then (whilst looking deep into the snake's jaws) that Alice noticed a tiny piece of wood that was speared onto the left-side fang. “I wonder if that's another of my missing jigsaw pieces?” Alice said to herself. “I simply must retrieve it, but how can I when the Lord's Prayer has quite simply vanished from my mind?” She racked her brains to remember the words, but the only “prayer” she could now recite all the way through was the lullaby called “Go to Sleep, Little Bear”. The reason she could remember this poem so well had a lot to do with the fact that it had only four lines containing only twenty-two words, many of which were repeated:

"Go to sleep, little bear.

  Do not peep, little bear.

And when you wake, little bear,

  I will be there, little bear."

So this was the “Lord's Prayer” that Alice recited to the Under Assistant of the Civil Serpents whilst at the same time fixing her gaze, icily, upon his. Only, for this rendition, Alice (quite against her will) changed the words slightly:

"Go to sleep, little creep.

  Do not peep, little creep.

And when you're deep, little creep,

  I will not weep, little creep."

Alice felt despondent at losing the rhyme between there and bear in her new version of the lullaby, but ever so pleased at having replaced it with the new rhymes between sleep and peep and creep and deep and weep. She thought her creation a much better poem! Not that the Under Assistant paid much mind to the ins and outs of poetic rhyming schemes; he was altogether too very tired to care anymore. His head slumped into slumber. Snakes don't have eyelids of course, but if that snake had had them, he would have closed them then. When Mister Snake was quite asleep, Alice removed (very carefully) the jigsaw piece from his left fang. It showed only a pattern of purple and turquoise scales but Alice knew that it would fit perfectly into the reptile house section of her jigsaw picture of London Zoo. She popped it into her pocket (alongside the badger piece and the termite piece) and then unwound (also very carefully) Mister Snake from Celia's fingers. Alice then carried the snake over to the nearest hedgerow where she placed him gently down in a bundle of leaves. Mister Snake wrapped himself into a reef knot and then into a bow, and finally into a double snakeshank, in which convoluted shape he started to loudly snore.

“Alice, you have released me from servitude!” With that croakment the statue stepped down from her podium with a creaking gait, which sounded very much like a creaking gate. Celia came up very close to Alice and, once there, she shook Alice's hand.

Alice felt very shivery to be shaking a porcelain hand, but shake it she did. “Celia,” she cried, “I'm very pleased to have found you and Whippoorwill once again, but how in the garden did you get to be so tall for a doll?”

“I'm not a doll anymore,” replied Celia, “I'm a terbot.”

“A turbot!” exclaimed Alice. “That's a kind of fish, isn't it?”

“Indeed it is: a European flatfish with a pale-brown speckled one-dimensional body. But that definition only counts when the word's got a U in it.”

“Oh, I'm dreadfully sick of words with 'U's in them rather than their proper letters!”

“A terbot, on the other hand, is an automated creature powered by termites.”

“Termites?”

“Exactly so, Alice. Termites. I have termites in my brain. Take a look.” Celia bent forwards at her squeaking waist and then turned a couple of screws on each side of her temple. She swivelled aside the top of her head. Alice leaned forward to peer into the gaping skull and found inside a loosely packed mound of soil through which a million termites were scuttling, and no doubt passing questions and answers and answers and questions to each other.

“So you're using the beanery system?” asked Alice.

“I wouldn't know anything about beans,” answered Celia. “I think I must be an automaton. You know what an automaton is, don't you, Alice?”

“Is it a toy that can move without being pushed or dragged?”

“That is correct, and that is what I have become. I am the automated version of you, Alice. The word automaton comes from the ancient Greek; it means that I'm self-moving; it means that I'm self-improving. In point of fact, I've improved myself so much. . . I've become rather more intelligent than a human being.”

“But surely,” Alice said, “in order to equal the thinking of a single human mind, a termite mound would have to be as large as the world itself.” (Alice was only borrowing this knowledge from Captain Ramshackle, not really stealing it, so we can forgive her for this slight copycattering, surely?)

“Indeed it would be,” replied Celia (referring to the mound-size), “but that argument fails to remember the ingenuity of Pablo the sculptor. Pablo has managed to breed the termites down to the size of pencils.”

“But pencils are so much longer than termites,” Alice argued.

“Not if they're used up from the tip and nibbled down from the eraser. Eventually a pencil will meet itself in the middle and then it will vanish. Just like us, Alice! Perhaps we faded away from both ends until we met in our middles and then we vanished! I'm a work of art, did you know that?” Celia twirled around quite proudly as she said this. I'm terbo-charged!"

“Celia, why are you dropping the letter 'T' from the word?” Alice asked.

“Because that's how the future people say it,” Celia replied. “You do know that we're in the future now, Alice? I must have slipped from your fingers whilst falling through the tunnel of clock-numbers. I therefore entered the future at an earlier date than you did. I landed in 1998 a whole week before you. I had grown to my present size, but I was still only a doll. I could not move at all, or even think for myself. Pablo the sculptor claims that he found me lying in this very garden, in a briar of roses.”

“Did Mister Pablo plant this knot garden?” Alice asked.

“He most certainly did. Pablo's hobby is to make terbots, you see? The Civil Serpents look down upon this hobby; they think it very unreal. Only by promising that his creations would be trapped forever in a garden of knots and guarded by snakes could Pablo convince the Serpents that his work be allowed. It was Pablo that put the computer-mites in my skull. Alice, my dear, it was as if I had woken up from a long, long sleep of dollness. I came alive!”

“Celia, I'm very glad that you're alive,” stated Alice, “but I simply must get you and Whippoorwill and myself back to Great Aunt Ermintrude's house in time for my two o'clock writing lesson.” Just then an almighty commotion took place beyond the knot garden; red and white lights flashed in the sky above the hedgerows and a piercing cry howled through the morning, followed by what sounded very much like a policeman's whistle being blown. “Whatever's happening now?” cried Alice.

“Maybe it's something to do with the Jigsaw Murder,” replied Celia.

“You know about the Jigsaw Murder?” a surprised Alice enquired.

“I don't know much about the case,” Celia replied, “but I do know that Whippoorwill isn't too happy with the sudden disturbance.” Indeed, the parrot was flapping his green-and-yellow wings in a chaotic pattern that Captain Ramshackle would have been very proud of. It was these movements that caused Alice to remember certain words that the Badgerman had spoken. “Celia,” she asked, “would you happen to know the whereabouts of a certain Professor Gladys Chrowdingler by any chance?”

“I'm afraid I don't. What does she study?”

“The Mysteries of Time.”

“That does sound useful. We must do our very best to find this professor.”

“What about an ellipsis? Do you know what one of those is?”

“An ellipsis? Isn't that the sister of an ellipse?”

“Celia, I think your computermites must be on holiday. Oh, if only I'd asked Captain Ramshackle where Professor Chrowdingler lived! But I was in such a hurry to find Whippoorwill. At least I've managed one good job this day!” With these words Alice reached out to lift Whippoorwill off Celia's shoulder. But the parrot was too quick for her: with a flickering fluttering of feathers he managed to fly off Celia's shoulder just before Alice's fingers reached him. He flew above the hedgerows over towards where the lights were flashing.

“Oh goodness!” exclaimed Alice. “Whippoorwill has once again escaped! However shall we find him this time? This garden is so tightly knotted.”

“I think I may know a way,” Celia answered, taking hold of Alice's hand. “Follow me.”

The Automated Alice led the Real-life Alice over to where a small garden shed was sitting in one curvy corner of the maze's centre circle. (I say “sitting” because the garden shed really did appear to be sitting on the grass, and rather awkwardly at that!) Above the closed door, a painted sign read: OGDEN'S REVERSE BUTCHERY. The garden shed was tilted precariously to one side, with many planks missing, and even more of them just about to fall off. From within came a terrible racket: a terrible banging! and a clattering! and then a terrible walloping! and then a terrible cursing cry! and then yet more banging! and clattering! and, indeed, walloping! To Alice's eyes, it looked very much like the garden shed had been dropped from a great height: indeed, she was certain that the shed hadn't even been there when she had first entered the centre of the maze, but how could a common-or-garden garden shed simply appear out of nowhere?